“Have it right here.”
He said, “Good,” giving her hand a squeeze before letting go, his eyes smiling at her. “I didn’t want you to think I’d forgot you. See, I missed working out this morning on account of going to Marion—I do push-ups and sit-ups, lift some weights, so when I come back I had to get that done—”
“And have your supper,” Carmen said.
“Yeah, I had to eat. I imagine you folks stopped on the way?”
“Not since lunch.”
“Well, you want to get something first? There’s a Shoney’s on Route K out toward the mall, not too far.”
“We’re trying to decide,” Carmen said, “whether we want to stay here or go to a motel.”
“Or turn around and go home,” Wayne said. “Have you been inside that house lately?”
Wayne stood with his arms folded. Next to him, Carmen noticed, F. R. Ferris Britton was about the same height but wider through the shoulders in that tight sport coat. At the moment he seemed confused, frowning as he looked at the house.
“I know the ‘lectricity’s off, that’s why I brought these candles. But it’s only temporary, just tonight till you get it turned back on. No, that’s a nice little house, I got one just like it not too far from here.”
“We did too,” Wayne said. “Our first house was this same idea, two-bedroom ranch.”
“Up in De-troit?”
“That’s right, Ferris, near De-troit.”
Carmen thinking, Here we go . . .
As Wayne said, “The only difference is, Ferris, we didn’t keep goats in our house, or pigs or whatever they had living in this one, ’cause it’s a goddamn mess, inside and out.”
“Gee, I didn’t think it was that bad. I know it might need a little work,” the young marshal still frowning, showing concern. “Come on, let’s us take a look.”
It was dusk outside, dark in the house. They went in through the side door, Carmen and Wayne following the deputy marshal, each holding a lighted candle. In the kitchen he turned to them saying, “We could use cups as holders, so we don’t drip wax all over.”
Carmen, already looking in a cupboard, heard Wayne say, “You think it matters? You can feel the dirt and grit on the floor.” There were dishes on the shelves, but not many. Most of them were piled in the sink, soiled, some crusted with bits of food. Carmen opened the refrigerator and closed it quick against the awful rancid odor. There were dirty pans on the range.
“The couple lived here before,” Ferris said, “I suspect she wasn’t much of a housekeeper. All the woman did was complain. She ran out on him, oh, a few months ago. Then he left, was only last week, right before we found out you all were being relocated here and J. D. Mayer told me I’d be acting-inspector in charge, see to your needs.”
“Come here, Ferris, I want to show you something,” Wayne said. “I want you to look at the carpeting in the living room. I can’t even tell what color it is.”
Following Wayne, the deputy marshal said, “I think it’s kind of a green.”
Carmen watched their candles moving away in the dark. She stepped into the hall to look at the bedrooms, both tiny, twin beds crowded into what would be the front bedroom, the other one empty, cardboard boxes stacked against a wall. Wayne would have a few words to say about the twin beds. She could hear him in the living room telling the marshal to look at the stains and here, look at the drapes, like some animal had been chewing on them, the front of the sofa, the same thing.
The bathroom didn’t seem too bad, for a bathroom. Scrub it with a disinfectant, get rid of the shower curtain full of mildew stains. Do something with the window. The windows in the bedrooms, too, all the windows, clean the whole place good . . . if they were going to stay here. Right now it was someone else’s house. Carmen followed her candle into the living room. The upholstered furniture, modern-looking, appeared white, the carpeting more gray than green. The walls seemed to be white or off-white.
Ferris was telling Wayne the couple that’d lived here had had a little puppy must not have been housebroken, left its little messes wherever it wanted, little black-and-white shorthaired pup. Looking at Carmen he said, “I know it would try to chew on my shoelace if I wasn’t wearing my boots, which I generally do. These here are Tony Lamas I sent away for. I’d give the puppy a little kick, not to hurt it none, you understand, but the woman’d have a fit. She took the pup when she left. Her name was Roseanne—I mean the woman, I forgot the puppy’s name.” Ferris paused. “It’ll come to me. Roseanne, the woman, had real blond hair but was older than you folks. Both of ’em were, her and the guy, her husband.”
“These people,” Wayne said, “were in the witness program?”
“We call it WitSec,” Ferris said, “short for Witness Security. Yeah, they were here when I got assigned last winter, after I finished my thirteen weeks training at the academy. See, I was a police officer in West Memphis, Arkansas, that’s my home, before I joined the Marshals Service and was sent to this district.”
“You like it?” Carmen said. “I mean Cape Girardeau.”
“Yeah, I like it, it’s nice. See, I’ll work security in the federal court when it’s in session, or I’ll get a call from the local Bureau office, there two resident agents here, back them up when they make an arrest and then take charge of the prisoner or seize his assets if he’s got any, like his car, and arrange for its disposition, you know, sell it at auction or we might use it in surveillance work. Like this house was seized, it was owned by a guy was running dope on the interstate, St. Louis to Memphis, and was using this house as a place to stash it if he wanted, or sell some of it. You know the See-Mo campus is here, Southeast Missouri State? I’m thinking of taking some business courses, maybe computer programming, something like that. I can get home when I want, it’s not too far to West Memphis, and there’s good deer hunting right over here in Bollinger County.”
Carmen watched Wayne. He said, “Is that right?” trying to sound only mildly interested. “Whitetail or mule deer?”
“Whitetail and plenty of him. But getting back to your question,” Ferris said, “the one here before you was a guy name Ernie Molina, little guy, had this little mustache. He was a loan shark from over in New Jersey. Ernie and his wife I mentioned, Roseanne.”
Carmen was about to speak, but Wayne beat her to it. “That’s the guy’s real name, Ernie Molina, or the one he made up?”
“His real one. What he changed it to—this’s funny—was Edward Mallon, see, E.M., using the same initials on account of he had, what do you call it, his monogram on all his shirts, on the pocket here. Guy had more shirts’n I ever saw in my life, like he musta had a good twenty shirts or more hanging in his closet, I’m not kidding you. The thing was, it was funny, he’s going by this name Edward Mallon, but you could tell by looking at him he was a greaser. Excuse me, I mean a Latin. I have to watch that. I come here, Ernie’s not doing nothing, living offa Uncle Sam, I took him over to Procter and Gamble’s and got him a job, but he didn’t care for it, so he quit and got himself one tending bar. Ernie was a nervous type, I think drank a lot.”
“We were told,” Carmen said, glancing at Wayne in the candle glow, “you aren’t supposed to talk about people in the program, reveal their identity. Isn’t that right?”
Ferris seemed surprised. “Well, you’re not gonna tell anybody, are you?” He started to grin. “Being in the same club, so to speak, as him. No, I take that back. Ernie’s gone, so he’s not in WitSec no more. Now my responsibility, as far as the program goes, is to protect you folks, keep you out of harm. I know there a couple guys looking for you, they have detainers out on them and you’re gonna testify at their trial if and when, but that’s about all. See, Marshal J. D. Mayer was given the information and told me you were coming and would be in my care. He’s on sick leave, his pump acting up on him, and I doubt will be back. He’s funny, I ask him things and he says, ‘Look, Ferris, I tell you what you need to know and what you don’t won’t hurt you.’
So all I got is a file with not much in it. I don’t know if you’re actually married or common-law or even what your real names are.”
Carmen said, amazed, “Are you serious?”
“Well, nobody’s told me.”
“We’re Mr. and Mrs. Colson. We’re actually married, in church, and that’s our name.”
“What I have in the report, then—that’s your Christian name, Carmen?”
She said, “I don’t believe this. Yes, it is.”
“That’s a nice name,” Ferris said. “I like it.” He looked at Wayne. “And you’re Wayne Morris Colson? That’s the name on your original birth certificate?”
Wayne took a moment, staring back at him in the candle glow. “What’s your problem?”
“Hey, there’s no problem. It was my understanding that to be in WitSec you have to take on a new identity. Anybody I’ve ever heard of in it, that’s what they did. I’ll study out that file again, satisfy my curiosity. It’s possible I could’ve missed something.”
“But you sound like you don’t believe us,” Carmen said.
“No, I believe you, you tell me your real name’s Carmen, that’s fine with me. I just want to get it straight in my own mind what you have to do and what you don’t. As I told you, I wasn’t given much information.”
“And you haven’t been a marshal very long,” Wayne said.
“Be a year come January. I might not be up on all the procedures, or you might say the fine print as to what you agreed to. But let me tell you, I know what I have to do. I’m armed at all times, got a three-fifty-seven Smith and Wesson on me, and I’m sworn to protect your lives to the death.”
Wayne said, “You do some deer hunting, uh?”
“Yeah, I go over to Bollinger County along the Castor River track, it’s only about fifty miles, full of whitetail in there.”
Carmen went outside. She got her sweater from the car and put it on. It was quiet. She held her arms to her body and rubbed them for warmth.
Trees against the night sky could be trees anywhere, but she could feel a difference knowing she was in a strange place. There were people a block or so down the street in the homes where lights showed, but she didn’t know them and couldn’t see the town now, out here, with its postcard look from the bridge, the church steeple, the courthouse, the friendly town where people might stop you on the street wanting to know you. . . . She thought, How did we get here? How did it happen so fast?
Wayne and Ferris came out of the house and across the yard, Ferris saying, “If you haven’t seen one then you wouldn’t believe a swamp rabbit. I mean the size of him. He’s different’n a cottontail and two or three times bigger. I got me one, was on Coon Island in Butler County, weighed eighteen pounds.”
Wayne asked if they were good eating.
“Good,” Ferris said, “swamp rabbit’s so good to eat people have just about killed him out.”
He shook their hands, ready to leave, then spoke for several minutes about motels and places to eat out on the highway, recommending the ones he said wouldn’t cost them an arm and a leg, then telling Carmen about West Park Mall, knowing, he said, how women loved to shop whether they needed anything or not. “Hey, Wayne? Isn’t that the truth?” He told them he’d be by tomorrow and drove off with a couple of toots from his car horn.
Wayne turned to Carmen. “The guy’s a moron.”
“But a deer hunter,” Carmen said. “Doesn’t that make a difference?”
“Ferris does push-ups and lifts weights. I’ll bet he likes to arm-wrestle, too.”
“Why did he say he doesn’t want us to think of him as a parole officer? Did you hear him? Why should we?”
“I don’t know. He probably meant as far as we don’t have to report to him.”
Carmen was silent looking at the sky, picking out faint stars. After a moment she said, “I think he meant something else.”
After another moment Wayne said, “The whitetail season here’s only seven days, the week before Thanksgiving.”
14
* * *
“ALL I COULD THINK OF,” Lenore said, “you were in a terrible accident. I’ve been worried sick.”
“Mom, you know we got here okay. I called you from the motel, soon as we walked in the door.”
“I mean since then I’ve been worried.”
“And I called the other night. Didn’t I?”
“Once, since you got there. Don’t your neighbors have phones you could use?”
“We don’t have neighbors. We’re sort of off by ourselves. I haven’t met anyone yet. Anyway, Mom . . .”
“You’ve been gone six days, almost a week counting today. I have it marked on the calendar. You didn’t even come see me before you left.”
“I told you, it happened all of a sudden,” Carmen said. “Anyway, we have our phone now. Southwestern Bell came this morning—I had them put it in the kitchen, well, actually in the breakfast nook. It’s like a little booth, you know, with benches built in? You can look out the window . . . The washer and dryer are in the utility room, right off the kitchen, having the phone here it’ll be handy.” Carmen letting her mom know she could be seven hundred miles away but was still the happy homemaker, out here baking pies, washing Wayne’s coveralls, fixing dinner off recipe cards. “There’s a woods behind the house, not like the one we have at home, Wayne says it isn’t a woods it’s a thicket, but it’s nice, you hear birds out there.” That might sound as though she was having a good time, so Carmen said, “We’ve been working since we got here. We had to shampoo the carpeting, the sofa and two chairs in the living room, rent one of those machines, scrub the kitchen floor, do the cupboards, the refrigerator and my least favorite of all jobs, clean the oven. Wayne helped a lot, he didn’t report to his job till this morning so, you know, we could get settled. We may do some painting, we’re trying to decide, depending on how long we’ll be here.” Carmen paused to think of what else she wanted to say. . . . Yeah, remind her not to tell anyone where they were. She said, “Mom . . .”
Too late.
“You said a few weeks.”
“That’s what Wayne thinks.”
“I don’t see why he has to go all the way to Missouri to get work. Like there isn’t any around here.”
“It’s a change,” Carmen said. “He’ll know more in a few days. It’s not a real big job.” He did go see about one this morning, that much was true, though it wasn’t structural work. Wayne said he didn’t care, he had to be doing something; threw his coveralls in the pickup and took off to meet Ferris Britton at Cape Barge Line & Drydock.
“What’s your weather like?”
Her mom would ask that daily, when they were living only thirty miles apart. “It’s around seventy,” Carmen said, “sort of cloudy, but it’s been nice all week.”
“It’s raining here, and cold. It’s suppose to go down to forty tonight. I hate this weather.”
“You could move to Florida, nothing’s stopping you.”
“I don’t know anybody in Florida. What if something happened to me? Like one of my back seizures and I can’t move, I have to lie perfectly still. There is nothing like that pain when you try to move. I felt one coming on the other day, I called the doctor . . .” Lenore stopped. “I may have to change my number again. Either that or have the Annoyance Call Bureau put a trap on my line, find out where he’s calling from and get him.”
“You had an obscene phone call?”
“I had two hang-ups the same day. The kind where you know the party is on the line but they don’t say anything.”
“Didn’t even breathe hard?”
“It happens to you, you won’t think it’s so funny. I thought it was the doctor, I was waiting for him to call me back. You can wait all day, they don’t care.”
“When was this, Mom?”
“Soon as I started to feel the pain. When do you think? You know they call to find out if you’re home, that’s how they work it. Call and hang up.”
“O
r it’s someone who got the wrong number,” Carmen said. “Have any of our friends called?”
“Why would they call here?”
“I doubt if they will, but if you do get a call . . . See, we didn’t tell anyone we were going. Wayne doesn’t want the guys in the local to know he’s working out of state. I don’t understand it myself, but if anyone calls just say we’re driving down to Florida and you haven’t heard from us yet. Okay? So Wayne won’t have to worry about it.”
“You don’t know when you’re coming home?”
Getting an old-lady quiver in her voice. Lenore was sixty-seven years old, she could be tough as nails, dance on a table after a few vodkas with grapefruit juice, or she could sound utterly helpless, real whiny, when she wanted something.
“Wayne says he’ll know pretty soon. He just started today, but as soon as we find out . . . We’re gonna be talking anyway.”
Lenore said, “If I get one of my seizures . . .”
“Try not to think about it.”
“I don’t know what I’d do, being all alone. I don’t even have your number. What’s that area code, three-one-five?”
“Three-one-four.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s right on the phone,” Carmen said, looking at it.
“All right, give me the number.” After a moment her mom said, “Carmen, where are you? What’re you doing?”
She was looking across the kitchen, through the open doorway to the hall. She said, “Just a second, Mom,” raised her voice and called out, “Wayne.” She waited.
Lenore was saying, “What? I didn’t hear what you said. Area code three-one-four, then what?”
“I thought I heard Wayne come in,” Carmen said. She paused before giving her mom the number, listened to her repeat it, said, “That’s right.” And in that moment looked up again. Sure of the sound this time. Someone closing the side door.
“For all the good it will do me,” Lenore said, “if I’m flat on my back and you’re down in Missouri somewhere.”